podpolia

Saddam Hussein will be hanged within a month. Naturally, the people who still like him are fairly irate about it, threatening to randomly kill Americans if the Iraqi government executes a mass murderer. Suprise, suprise.
They’re probably more upset because a figurehead and rallying point is about to be eliminated. With Saddam dead, they can no longer claim to be a legitimate resistance movement to reinstate the ‘real’ government. He won’t do them nearly as much good as a martyr as he has as a legitimizing figurehead.
This will by no means stop the sectarian violence in Iraq. That is likely to continue until the Iraqi government manages to get their police and military services to a point where they can effectively fight the insurgency. In fact, violence will probably temporarily escalate as Saddam sympathizers carry out their revenge killings. However, the execution of Saddam will definitely remove one small figure with a very long shadow from the situation.

UPDATE 12/30/06 12.59PM: Saddam has been executed. The Iraqi government got its verdict and didn’t fool around.

Ouch.

Ouch.

The recent news coming out of Iran is quite encouraging in a way — students in Iran are protesting Ahmadinejad, despite threats to their lives. He seems shocked that people don’t like him. Either that, or he can’t believe they’re actually doing anything about it.

Lord Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley (and if there is a more British name than that, I haven’t heard it) has sent an open letter to the two global warming scaremongers in the US Senate, basically telling them to shut their pie-holes. He takes a verbal swing at British scientist-activists as well. Definitely worth looking at, and it just goes to illustrate something I’ve long believed: nobody does a dressing-down like the British.